If you are starting with nothing but your energy and character, that’s enough to launch a successful career—if you follow the recipe in this chapter to build your value, especially through the acquisition of compatible skills.
Binary Thinking
King of late-night television, Greg Gutfeld, calls this the Prison of Two Ideas. In politics, on social issues, and in our personal lives, we tend to pick sides as if there are only two. If someone proposes an idea, we treat it as either bad or good. It will either work or fail. Yes or no.
In the real world, things are messy. Often the best you can do is create friction to reduce some behaviors while adding incentives to increase other behaviors. In both cases, you’d be lucky if you can nudge the problem a little bit. Rarely can you solve a problem 100 percent.
So lose the yes-no framing for all your political, personal, and business decisions. Look instead for the friction (penalties) or the incentives to make your decisions.
Usual Frame: A plan will either work or not
Reframe: Friction and incentives always work. We just don’t know how well until they are tested.
You might be scratching your head and wondering who needs to learn this reframe. Doesn’t everyone already know friction and incentives change behavior?
Yes, but reframes don’t care what you already know. They don’t care what is true. They don’t care what is logical. They work mindlessly to tune your brain for better performance. The need for this reframe arose because society has become so polarized we take sides reflexively and lose our ability to appreciate risk, friction, motivation, and everything else that requires nuanced thinking.
“Friction and incentives always work” is a strong high-ground position to take when you are judging a plan, especially combined with a call for testing to find out. It’s hard for anyone to have a stronger take than that, so capture that high ground first before someone else gets there. You’ll look like the smartest person in the room.
Planning
It was once common sense to be super-careful about how you spent money or used other resources. That made sense when resources were limited and hard to replace. Today, if you have a startup, for example, it may make sense to spray some ideas into the world and use up some resources to see what happens. You can learn by failing fast and cheaply. Every situation is different, so I’ll trust you to know when “measuring twice and cutting once” makes sense and when it doesn’t.
Usual Frame: Measure twice, cut once.
Reframe: Just start. See if you can figure it out as you go.
Doing your research before acting will always make sense. But like most good things, there can be too much of it. If your caution and research prevent you from acting and the consequences of tiptoeing into a project are not dramatic, you might be better off jumping in to see if you can sink or swim.
For example, I became one of the highest paid speakers on the professional speakers’ circuit for years. I got there by being terrible at the start and learning by failing until I achieved some baseline competence. It helped that I am immune from embarrassment, but that’s a separate topic.
If you saw the batch of Dilbert comics I submitted to comic syndicates to start my career, you would be amazed how poorly drawn they were. And I doubt you would find them funny. Luckily for me, one editor—Sarah Gillespie, editor at what was United Media—spotted some kind of “voice” in my writing that she believed she could tease out. And she did. In other words, I started before I knew how to finish, and I figured it out.
The universe rewards action over inaction. The exception is when you need to invest more money than you can afford to lose or take some other drastic risk. In those cases, I don’t recommend jumping in before you know what your plan is. But for most decisions in modern times, you can test the first step and see what happens before going any further.
A simpler way to make this point is that you should favor action over caution when the cost of taking the wrong action is low. Drawing some bad comics and embarrassing myself at a speaking event are low-cost risks. It made sense to take them.
But don’t take out a second mortgage on your house to open a cat-petting cafe unless you have done a lot of research first. You’ll recognize the situations in which more caution is appropriate.
Schoolwork
I don’t know anyone who enjoys studying. It’s boring and painful. The reframe that I found useful in my school days involved treating tests as competitive events. I didn’t mind doing work to win a competitive event. But I hated studying on the promise it would be useful someday in the future. That wasn’t motivating.
The following reframe can only work for someone who is competitive by nature. If you tell me doing something hard and boring will help me win a competition, I want to get going on that hard and boring stuff right away!
Usual Frame: School is boring but necessary.
Reframe: School is a competitive event. Game on.
In my school days, it was common for teachers to let the rest of the class know who did the best on tests, which motivated me to compete for the honor. To be honest, I wouldn’t have competed if I didn’t think I could win often enough to make it worth trying. So the competition has to be realistic. I recommend competing against someone specific in your class—a friend or even a nemesis—but choose someone you have a chance of beating on a good day. You don’t need to tell anyone you are competing. Just compete.
Usual Frame: Compete against yourself and try to improve over time.
Reframe: Compete against others even if the others are unaware of the competition.
It isn’t an accident that sports and politics attract so much energy. Apparently, we evolved to compete for resources and mates, an instinct we can’t turn off. We want to look capable compared to those around us because that’s the best way to attract both resources and mates. If you tap into that primal energy—the driving force of all human evolution—you will give yourself far more energy to study harder and longer than if you are studying because someone once told you it would help you later in life.
I’m not recommending a win-at-all-costs mentality. I don’t think that’s healthy for most of us. I’m making the mundane observation that all managers know: If you don’t measure, you are not managing. It’s fun and healthy to watch improvement in your own performance, but if you want enough energy to operate at your highest potential, consider a real or imagined competition with someone close to your abilities. Competition is what gets your energy up. Good intentions and discipline are not enough.
Motivating People
If you see someone do something wrong, the normal impulse is to point out the error and explain how to do it right. In a life-and-death situation or for anything critical, that’s exactly the right thing to do—get to the point.
But most things are not urgent. Much of life involves teaching people how to do something you know how to do but they do not. That could involve instructing kids, coworkers, customers, whoever. If you’re good at it, people want you to be the boss, or at least have more responsibility. So become good at motivating people. It gives you options.
My first comics editor was a genius at criticizing the work of artists without hurting their feelings. My favorite saying of hers was, “Your other work is stronger.” It was a compliment and a criticism at the same time. I laughed when she used it on me. And that was a good outcome, too. This reframe starts with that gem and adds some examples you can build from.